Program director Chuck Miller hired me in August 1995 as a jazz dj for NPR affiliate WGLT in Normal, IL. I would work two shifts of 3 or 4 hours programming jazz, broadcasting syndicated shows by both Branford and Wynton Marsalis via tape or satellite feed. While I had studied clarinet from middle school through to my 3rd year in college, I had only played jazz in my high school band, where we played jazz, classical, marching band music, salsa and traditional irish folk songs. Like most of the music I had grown to love from punk to jazz, I picked it up and learned about it in a vacuum (due to race, class and location, more on this later), through my own research as a teenager and young adult. So to have programs I could run from NPR and the biggest jazz library I had ever seen, my education grew ten fold in a matter of weeks! I did have constraints due to the format the music director wanted us to use, but I only saw it as a challenge to learn mo
“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.” — Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison